Entertainment

Rockwall's Jason Castro makes some pronouncements in Entertainment Weekly that might be painful to fans' ears. Interviewed during Neil Diamond week, he told EW: "What happens happens. I'll sing and if people like it, they like it. And if they don't, they don't. I'm kind of ready to go home. ... It's been overwhelming. I got 150 balloons yesterday delivered to the studio because people heard I was sick last week. That's cool, but that's just weird."

Harry Potter history has been made. According to Paper Cuts, a New York Times blog, Sunday will mark the first time in 10 years there will be no J.K. Rowling books on the paper's best-sellers list.

"Rowling and this publication's sales rankings have a long and sometimes tangled history," the blog notes. "The first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, crept quietly onto the bottom of the hardcover fiction list on Dec. 27, 1998. (How far back was that? Eight days earlier, Bill Clinton had been impeached by the House of Representatives.) Within a year and a half, however, Pottermania was in full bloom; the top three places on the hardcover fiction list were held by Rowling titles, and a fourth Potter book was on the way."

The blog recounts the multiple lists that had to be invented to keep Potter books from dominating. Harry, in the end, was parked in children's "series" books.

Want to boost your brainpower – or just look as if you have? The May Wired has plenty of tips, including several from cover boy Steve Carell: "I've learned to appear scintillatingly intellectual by asking people questions ('Do you like pizza?'). Then I just look at them, nodding and saying 'Hmmm' and 'Um hmmm' every few seconds."

If you're wondering how your own storehouse of cultural knowledge rates, the magazine offers a graph. On the "Easy/Embarrassing" end are "TV Theme Song Lyrics" and "Names of Bond Girls"; "Mozart Symphonies" show up as "Impressive/Hard." "Monty Python Sketches" are considered even harder to master, but are definitely less impressive.

The Eagles (with Dallas' Don Henley) got some good ink from Orange County Register critic Ben Wener, who caught a "fantastic performance" Friday at the Stagecoach festival in Indio, Calif.:

"I've seen the Eagles a number of times during these later reunion years, and I've always come away less than impressed; even at their best they can still seem robotic. They are superb musicians, absolutely, but their intense attention to finer points, never mind a sometimes sluggish pace, can leave a chill in the air ... when so many of their staples cry out for the warmth of a good party.

"Yet, out in the desert night, under the stars and the searchlights, that's exactly what Stagecoach became – a perfectly mellow sing-along hang, despite the fisticuffs that broke out down near the stage."

Compiled by the GuideLive staff